Which expansion has the most enjoyable Rep Grinds?

[Orby]

rep grinds have never been 'fun', they are the biggest crux throughout this game.

But the Tabard grinds were pretty good, like choosing the faction you wanted to level and do dungeons with them, and the rep you got was pretty good. I even liked the MoP system of choosing a rep to level through doing dungeons too.

Much better than the slog we have and have had before and after.

[Baine]

MOP farming was good. I also enjoyed Firelands rep farming.

[Dristereau]

Legion didn't really feel like a problem to me. Reps felt alright, it was a bit more open how Rep was gained with World Quests and Mission Tables along with the Bodyguard Sytem rewards and Suramar having a structured story, as well as adding in Paragon Reps and BoA Rep Tokens for Alts. BFA is kinda like Legion 0.5, with World Quests/Missions giving barely anything, kekontracts (10 rep, seriously?) and all fun removed.

I didn't hate tabards either, gave them more purpose than buy at Exalted for an appearence to then vendor/store in the bank.

[valky94]

wotlk/cata with tabards or mop with the stars and spam dungeons

[Afrospinach]

Only thing enjoyabale ever that came from reputation is when i get 5k gold from a paragon chest. Else its just silly grind, no matter what expansion you take.

Well that would be because the current xpac is literally endless... true in almost all aspects.

Like I have mentioned here before, why I like argent dawn. I can do it when I want. I have a specific goal, I have a specific end time. I get why people like the WotLK thing but the tabards made the rep fell very incidental and did not connect you to anything in game.

The alternative is getting everything right now.

[RobertMugabe]

TBH I don't think that the current system where dungeons, world quests and emmisaries give you rep is bad. Actually I'd say that since Legion the reputation grinds have been the ONLY ever kinda enjoyable ones. The problem however is that in some way you're really forced to get all the way to exalted, while in earlier expansions exalted was mostly optional with cosmetics.

[Sensa1]

The Tabard system in Woltk wasn't bad though the rewards weren't great. I like the Vanilla / Classic rep grinds best personally because they were completely optional, not time gated, had decent rewards and for the most part completely solo-able (with the exception of a few elite quests associated with particular rep grinds).

The type of Rep grinds are one of the real differences between old and modern WoW. After 3 expansions of variations on AP power, WQ's and mission tables I lost all desire to play alts in Retail knowing that I would have to grind all these reps over and over and over on 5 toons if I wanted them to remain somewhat competitive (geared etc). In Vanilla / Classic I currently have 3 toons. I will pick and choose which reps to grind based on the value to each toon and do the grinds at my leisure and own pace without the feeling of falling behind and it being a daily chore.

Rep grinds in Retail are central to character progression, driven by Blizzard's wish to generate MAU's and deal with the rate content is consumed in Retail (which leads to people briefly subscribing for patch content, getting what they want out of the patch and unsubscribing until the next patch). In many ways it's a problem of Blizzard's own making. As they tried to appeal to more and more people they made choices that made content more "accessible". More accessible content is consumed faster. More accessible content, especially content that requires little personal interaction, leads to players less invested, overall, in the game. Thus, to keep these players playing, you have to keep adding "gated" carrots to the stick in the form of progression grinds that last the entire expansion (but which are immediately useless at the end of the expansion). Then you have to keep doubling down on this because you're turning off or burning out more and more players and you have to find even more grinds and time gated content to keep those left to maintain / increase your MAU's.

I always laugh at people who say Vanilla / Classic is a grind - the grinds in old WoW don't hold a candle to the grinds in the modern version of the game.

[Tuor]

I'd say wotlk with the tabards system which means basically dungeon grind as an improved iteration of BC dungeon reps.

The Son's of Hodir wave at you.

[Athulua]

I think TBC. Just take a look at one faction in TBC repset: the Netherwing

Methods to increase the rep:
-do daily quests in the designated area
-farm mobs in the mines for a rare drop reputation item (equiv. to about 1 daily quest)
-fly around the zone for randomly spawning eggs, that have 100% drop rate for above item (also about 1 dq)
-at rep milestones (honored, revered) additional one-time questlines are unlocked

That's just 1 reputation. And the reward is a badass dragon mount in times where hardly anybody had dragon mounts. Majority of ppl had gryphons and wind riders.

What do we get now?

-Uhhh...grind world quests!

And that's for ALL THE FUCKIN FACTIONS!!!

We went from 1 rep having 3-4 options of increasing it to 8 reps having ONE option to increase them
And the rewards? Give me a break. Players have 400 mounts by now. They gonna buy that horse #37 for +1 and that's it. Gear? Obsolete after first mythic+ runs.
Oh, 8.2 brought mandatory char power rewards locked behind rep. Ofc gated by world quests because why wouldn't it!!!

[Zenlin]

I've personally never enjoyed them, ever since Vanilla and TBC. The action of doing something over and over is just simply not engaging to me. With that being said, that's why I found the reputation grind in Wrath to be the least invasive. You could get reputation by just putting on the tabard and doing dungeons, I was fond of that. TBC reputations and subsequent dailies are probably next on my list mainly because of their centralized locations. They tended to be in smaller hubs which allowed you to just knock them out rather quickly. I guess it just depends on what someone is looking for in regards to content though.

[Doffen]

TBC did it nicely. Though WoW was still pretty new for me I would likely swallow everything whole. But it didn't feel too much, and it gave you proper rewards like lots of Netherwing Mounts or Nether Ray mounts if you did those rep-grinds.

Legion too with WQs. I still find myself rather doing some of the Legion WQs instead of BfA ones now because on Argus for example you can get 1k gold in 3-4 mins if there are 4-5 WQs up with gold reward. The paragon however was kinda crap, though it was nice that they started with it seeing rep before Legion was just getting to exalted then there was nothing left to it. Incentive to do stuff, very important. Rep in BfA was also pretty fast to get.

[WowIsDead64]

Those were different times in wotlk. People maybe wore the tabards in their daily heroic, but chain running dungeons for rep just wasn't a thing when you had to scrape together your whole group from trade chat. Running normals just wasn't a thing either, and rep progress from dailies were really okay. The dungeon finder greatly changed how we play the game. But that was just from the very end of wrath (when rangom group finder was actually released), early cata. Heck, the first chain running era I remember was from mop, when people ran it for justice points to buy heirloom, and to cap valor or whatever.

I don't even remember, if tabard reps were available at release or they were added in famous LFD patch. There is big mistake, when players judge about whole xpack by looking at it's final patch only. Yeah, almost all xpacks were more or less fixed by the end. But it was just 1/4 of xpack's lifespan. 75% xpack wasn't that good.

[GucciWarr]

I honestly don’t know why everyone has such a giant problem with time gating; it’s an mmo it rewards time invested. It’s not like it’s impossible to catch up it just requires work.....sure joe schmoe might have higher rep than you even though he’s a shit player just because he can log in every day but that’s what an mmo is about...not only about skill but time invested as well

[nekobaka]

Dungeon grinding. As much as it is a big part of the game I generally dislike dailies and questing open world content as an endgame.

[AlmightyGerkin]

Wrath and Mists. Tabards were great for people running dungeons to gain valor points/justice points for the week and getting rep was a bonus. And Mists for allowing mains to send reputation increase items (forget the name) to alts to speed it up. Why they didn't continue that when they knew they were great systems who knows.

[Zantera]

I'm surprised how many praise the tabard rep system, to me that represents rep grinding at its most bland state. Some of those factions like Ebon Blade or Wyrmrest Accord I don't even remember getting exalted or anything surrounding the faction. On the other hand I do very much remember doing Netherwing dailies or Ogri'la ones, or Skyguard ones.

I definitely liked TBC quite a bit as I felt those factions had some variety to how you gained rep. Some of them being hubs and others dungeon-based. However I think a lot of it is nostalgia too.

[Qstall]

Mists of Pandaria

jk I almost died

[Littleraven]

For me it was MoP easily. I know people complain about the amount of them and all the stuff locked behind them but as far as actually doing them I enjoyed how each had their own little storyline with characters and flavor. We haven't really had that since. I still remember some of those characters and notice when they pop back up from time to time.

Honorable mention goes to Cataclysm and the Molten Front specifically. I loved doing the Firelands stuff and watching the are change as you progressed. For me little stuff like that goes a long way.

[Deferionus]

Burning Crusade on release. The expansion had attunement quests and objectives tied to unlocking Karazhan, TK, and BT on release and you had to get a certain rep threshold to unlock heroic dungeons, which were pretty rewarding at the time. This made the reps rewarding even past their vendor rewards.